Parked on the South Bank there’s a portal to Sri Lanka: Dries Verhoeven has set up a temporary internet cafe to link sixteen Londoners with sixteen Sri Lankans (and vice versa) over a distance of 8,805 kilometres for around an hour at a time. To enter is to join a cultural exchange programme for an isolated, peaceful, reflective hour that draws the liminal out of the virtual.
Sat barefoot at a computer terminal, headphones over ears, under the steady gaze of a webcam, we’re paired up – perhaps randomly, perhaps delicately – and connected to a performer in an internet cafe beachside in Sri Lanka. On the screen, words appear: some pre-typed and poetic as if coming from an impersonalised narrator; others emerge in the moment, stuttering in half-broken but readily-comprehensible English. I am, I soon discover, talking to/typing with Hansika, a twenty-year old woman, soon to train as a teacher, who was – like all our counterparts – caught up in the tsunami that wracked the region’s shorelines in 2004.
Under the guise of this online conversation – sometimes through text, sometimes through sound and image - Life Streaming becomes a gentle interrogation of cross-cultural assumptions. At times it adopts the ‘we’re not so different, you and I’ line of thought, where elsewhere it reveals a way of life so alien that it’s almost unrecognisable. Neither Hansika nor I, for example, have insurance, though for me it’s unthinking, for her, unthinkable. We have an interesting, almost-genuine encounter, which in the main she leads inquisitively and I follow. Where I ask questions or where my answers don’t fit neatly into the scheme, Hansika follows and adapts. It feels, as interactive work goes, unusually dialogical – in part, I suspect, because it admits so readily of its own particular status as performance structure. Verhoeven has been careful with his structuring, providing a prologue, an epilogue and several interludes. The result is a stage managed conversation that never becomes stymied.
Where Life Streaming really comes into itself is in its investigation of its own format. What does it mean, Verhoeven probes, for us (Hansika & I as well as the human collective) to communicate in this way? He begs the effect of distance and the distorting effect of mediatisation, ensuring an awareness of the incompleteness of one’s knowledge of the other person and the manipulation that can occur accordingly. There’s also a knife-twisting attack on our own assumptions, born of images and ideas that stand in for reality and experience. At times we are gently manipulated into a state of patronising commiseration, before being scolded for exactly that. “I don’t want your pity,” Hansika writes before I’ve even had a chance to express it to her, “We’ve only just met.” It’s a sharp slap delivered as a temperate reprimand.
In her review for The Guardian, Lyn Gardner rightly begs the question as to what distinguishes Life Streaming for any other online conversation. She might as well be asking whether a similar experience could be had courtesy of the random switchboarding of chatroulette. In some ways, she has a point. But then, so does Verhoeven. In fact, he has many, possibly including that question itself. His kind-hearted manipulation combined with the particular choice of virtual portal achieve – ie to Sri Lanka rather than elsewhere; his framing of the online exchange as experiential and his extension of that experience by pumping in smells that conjure an Eastern elsewhere, creating the orange glow, flickering with the rotations of a ceiling fan, reminiscent of the internet cafes Leonardo di Caprio finds in The Beach, the slow rising in temperature and humidity and finally, the gentle lap of hot water at your feet; all this combines to strengthen the sense of connection and shared experience, even if only as an idea rather than as actually achieved. It is moving, warm-hearted and softly uplifting.
Furthermore, Mark Ball deserves praise for its (undoubtedly costly) programming, since it sits as a necessary companion and counterpoint to Continuous City. Seeing it a mere twelve hours afterwards was to be reminded of the wonder within this inferno of our own making. Perhaps, just perhaps, online communication can be worthy after all. But then it’s what we do with technology that counts, right?
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